Argh

[chipotle]

What's been sucking my brain out for the last two weeks or so is a MUCK project. God help me, I'm starting one, despite my recent assertions that I was leery about getting involved with PuzzleBox chiefly on an available-time basis. Oh, yeah, instead of joining a MUCK, start one! That'll take much less time, moron.

I didn't intend to. I intended to make a specific place on Tapestries -- a place for giants and "normals" to interact, akin to the Giants' Club on FurryMUCK. I came up with what I thought was an interesting concept, a little more rough-and-tumble as befits Taps, and a neat character and basic background.

Then several things happened. I learned that Tapestries has imposed a building moratorium, which started about the time that they surgically excised the Tavern. (This may be a coincidence.) I learned that several people had a "Tapestries, feh" reaction, which the surgical excision of the Tavern didn't help (which certainly is not a coincidence). A few people I talked with about the idea seemed interested. And the character I'd come up with was, well, very insistent about being developed.

So I've been on a spree of self-inflicted pain, getting Fuzzball 6 out of CVS and tracking down global programs (and hacking on a few of them) and brainstorming on a wiki. The wiki's primary purpose has been to keep me from working in a vacuum; I'm doing nearly all the installation and building work myself, but I wanted to have feedback. Rather than rallying builders and wizards to the server, I've been rallying brainstormers to the wiki.

I worry that this will be controversial, after a fashion, taken as a sign of arrogance or elitism. But I've watched many MUCKs start out immediately experiencing "paralysis by committee." Let's face it, in practice a roleplaying MUCK does not need a lot of rooms, given how many rooms on most systems are used for transit -- or just blithely ignored on MUCKs which have grown too huge. I'm hoping that by requiring true in-character roleplaying -- even just in social situations, not organized tinyplots -- the involvement will come from, well, roleplaying. The place is going to be made or broken on the strength of its theme and the style of roleplaying and plots that the setting encourages.

"Wait," somebody may say (just my inner voice, perhaps), "you're talking about not only furries but macrophiles here, aren't you? And you're expecting them to roleplay rather than just have strange VR sex?" Well, uh, yes. The MUCK is going to be adults-only, to be sure, and I'm not going to pretend there won't be strange VR sex there if it takes off! Nonetheless, I'm taking an uncalculated risk: that there's enough creative people within and around that community who'll be willing to try a strongly-themed roleplaying environment, one where they have to create an appropriate character with constraints imposed by that theme, to make such a place sustainable. We'll see. (I do mean "around that community," too -- the setting, I sincerely hope, will be interesting enough to draw in people who are interested in roleplaying and not adverse to RP around and with giants.)

More will appear here when appropriate -- which will probably be soon. The curious can, however, visit the BandariMUCK wiki at http://www.ranea.org/wiki for disorganized details.

Comments

[mordrul.livejournal.com]

Does SCM deliberately lack rapid-transit tools like 'meet'?

Yup. You gotta get there physically. No allowances made for Q-hood. On the other hand, there's several different types of star drives. You have 'slow drives', which can travel from one corner of the galaxy (100x100 sectors in a square grid) in one single jump -- but it takes quite a while per sector. I don't yet know how long. They're nice and cheap. You have 'microwarp' drives, which take only 10 seconds per sector -- but can jump no further than 10 sectors per jump. Then you have normal warp, but I have no idea what the specs are on that. On the uber-elite (and uber-uber-UBER² expensive) end of the spectrum, you have spacefold drives. Pick a sector, and *BAMF* you're there. Still have to pilot into the system the slow way, though. There's one system I've seen which enforces a delay of something like 5 minutes or so just to fly in from the outer system to the inner. But only one, thankfully. The rest of them it's as quick and easy as moving from one room to the next on a normal MUCK. Did I mention they want to enforce RP? They do have a valid point in this. Say you're on a TP mission to smuggle contraband to a person on a spacestation. Say that you have to get from System A to System B to do so. And say that there's a Space Navy force with an Interdictor ship and some gunboats patrolling in between the two systems. Realistically speaking, you'd have to deal with them somehow. MSummon and other similar tools is kinda an unfair way around that -- in that particular context, of course.

As for sizes, I believe Chipotle is making character size a global stat, so that when you try to go through an exit, the game checks to see if you're within the room's size constraints. While you have a valid point about a giant poking their head in through the window, you're also assuming a window big enough to accomadate them easily without tearing the wall apart. It's a little messy, and I think the most expedient way of dealing with this is to simply have hard-coded size limits, which means the giant can't interact with the little inside the room, or not at all, wherein you can then pose that the giant is sticking in their head. Personally, I like the concept of having size limits hard-coded, but we'll have to wait and see what it's like in practice.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While character size is a global stat, right now there's not an easy way to make an exit lock based on that -- the server's lock system can only be keyed to see if a property is present or not, but can't test against the value of the property. I'll be working on it. :) I think for now, though, the idea that people can just roleplay that will work. I suspect when the place opens shortly there's going to be relatively few "interior" locations finished beyond Sharabu, anyway.